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In the political contests seeking to use climate change as a wedge issue and power pony, the hysterics aren't the only ones stuck on stupid. The sceptics have also painted themselves into a corner.
Based on the reasonable expectation that admitting a problem would lead to a huge government power grab, those conservatives with access to the biggest megaphones have used scientific uncertainty to avoid the issue. That game is just about up, and they suddenly find themselves walking unprepared into the middle of a sophisticated scientific and economic conversation about how to deal with the problem. While some conservative think tanks have considered these issues seriously for some time, the public discussion has been conducted up until now largely among various liberal factions and has turned into a technical debate about the most efficient tax scheme for reducing carbon emissions.There may have been short term political benefits for conservatives, but avoiding the issue is no more sensible in the medium and long term than the shrill rhetoric and empty promises of the illiberal statists. It isn't clear to me which group is the more foolish or will suffer the most damage the soonest.
A more insightful push-back against statist excesses and wrong headed efforts is the S&N criticisms of the politics of limits and doom, offering an alternative politics of possibility. It remains wrong headed in that the focus is still on political solutions to what is incontrovertibly a technological problem. A push-back against conservative obfuscation takes a very similar position.
In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts, the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options. The loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate literally all theorized climate-change risk would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk, not to mention our ability to lead productive and interesting lives in the meantime. The Precautionary Principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite. It's possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can't afford fire insurance.The difference between statist self-criticism and conservative self-criticism is in their respective trust of bureaucracies - government and otherwise. Conservatives have more doubt.In fact, a much more sensible strategy to deal with climate risk would emphasize technology rather than taxes. A science-based approach would hedge by providing support for prediction, mitigation, and adaptation technologies. . .
We should start with the development of better climate-prediction tools. The climate-modeling community has made real progress, but needs to mature rapidly if we are to use climate models as the basis for trillion-dollar decisions. . .
Our economy is on a long-term trajectory of decarbonization as it becomes less energy-intensive and as the relative prices of alternative energy sources continue to drop compared with the price of fossil fuels. Accelerating this process is valuable for many reasons other than those involving climate change. . .
Adaptation should take center stage, as it is by far the most cost-effective means of addressing climate risk. . .
The government can catalyze improvements in the relevant technologies, but it's absolutely essential that we avoid turning this into yet another huge corporate-welfare program . . . The agency for funding any government-sponsored research should be explicitly modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)--an agency with highly intelligent staff, who have wide flexibility in providing small grants for demonstrated progress in closing crucial technological gaps. . .I think that it's important to be even more doubtful. The reality is that you can't know just what will result from a DARPA approach. ARPANET wasn't the expected result. It's like inventing a better mouse-trap at a facility whose purpose was altogether different but that had a mouse problem that got some attention in odd moments of house-keeping angst. After the fact there were all sorts of stories developed and told to make it seem less serendipitous, but they are the products of hindsight bias. The real lesson here is that modest funding of an agency with highly intelligent staff can produce some interesting and valuable but unpredictable outputs, and we would be wise to take whatever comes rather than seeking to force particular results.The incremental cost of this approach could be single-digit billions per year, possibly with partially offsetting spin-off benefits. DARPA's total annual budget is about $3 billion, and--unlike Al Gore--it really did invent the Internet (original name: ARPANET). In fact, it's important that the honeypot be kept small enough, and be doled out in small enough increments, that it's not worthwhile for either Congress or Fortune 100 companies to try to direct the spending politically.
Unfortunately the conservatives, like the statists, think that the world revolves around them.
Conservatives should propose policies that are appropriately optimistic, science-based, and low-cost. This should be an attractive political program: It is an often-caricatured, but very healthy, reality that Americans usually respond well to the conversion of political issues into technical problems. After all, we're very good at solving the latter.It isn't the conversion of political issues into technical problems that Americans respond too, it's resistance to the conversion of technical problems into political issues. Once the politicians grasp that the parade goes on whether they get in front and pretend to lead or not, then Americans are happy to load the wagons and pull in harness.
Tocqueville put it best. He described in eerily accurate, if not completely flattering, terms how the American people react to radical plans put forth by a revolutionary leader: "They do not combat him energetically, they sometimes even applaud him. To his impetuosity they secretly oppose their inertia; to his revolutionary instincts, their conservative instincts; their homebody tastes to his adventurous passions; their good sense to the leaps of his genius; to his poetry, their prose. He arouses them for a moment with a thousand efforts, but soon after they get away from him, and, as if dragged down by their own weight, they fall back."IMO this is completely flattering. Americans are secure enough in themselves to listen to a would-be revolutionary leader and be entertained for a moment. Let him rant, it's a free country. Provide some free beer and they'll be happy to hang around for a show. But they'll go home and get on with life before dawn. There are mouse-traps to invent, tails to wipe and such. You know, reality.
It has been said that government is the problem, not the solution. The real problem is politics, not government. We are happy to govern ourselves and have a pretty sophisticated method of doing so. This is made more difficult by politics since it is a kind of peeing in the pool: it pollutes the social mind with misinformation and impedes problem solving. Those who are sincere in their desires to see a better world can help achieve that goal with good information rather than political obfuscation and dirty tricks. Though we can't predict just what the social mind will produce when supplied with good information about threats and problems, we can expect that it will meet those threats and solve those problems to the extent that is possible. Their success depends on the quality of their information more than anything else.
Success is not certain. Americans have been much less susceptible to political madness but they are increasingly exposed to European pathogens. The political epidemics that have repeatedly hammered Europe could spread to America. There are pools of infection on both coasts and some institutions are crippled. The media and academia are all but destroyed at this point. Lunatics roam the halls babbling nonsense. Things may get worse before they get better. The medicine we need now doesn't target any specific pathogen, it is a broad spectrum anti-politic.
Does this post imply you have brought into the carbon hysteria Gary, or simply an admission that the hysteria has become the new "reality" ? The science is no more certain than ten years ago, if anything it is in some ways less certain, but the political mood certainly has shifted. There is no longer much debate over the scientific merits of the AGW hypothesis, only over the extent to which people can be coerced into compliance with the dictates of the AGW aristocracy.
Posted by: Ed Snack at December 9, 2007 06:36 PMHi Ed,
I've always been sympathetic to the possibility that our measurable changes to the atmosphere would result in climate forcing. It's a certainty in the test tube, but less clear in the wild. Since we didn't yet have a useful grasp of natural climate change, and only the crudest grasp of the bewildering variety of human caused forcings - land use, albedo, aerosols, soot etc. - it has never been clear if we had a significant effect, or what was the relative contribution of each activity. I know my limits in some things at least, and this seems to be one where it's wise to listen closely, call bullshit when you smell it, and assume that there is a whole shoe store still left to drop.
This doesn't seem like hysteria to me, but perhaps it would be considered such by others? I'm sure that there are some who consider this to be denialism. I am comforted that there is something here to offend almost everyone. In most things this is an indicator of clarity.
I'm more certain about the energy issues. We need lots more of it, and need more advanced energy systems to get it. As it happens, this would also reduce carbon emissions, and I have spent some pixels arguing that this can be supported by both camps. Whether you fear carbon or not you should be able to support better energy systems unless you are among those fringe elements who are anti-humanist and relish the thought of catastrophe and a huge reduction in human population.
Whether we are altering the climate or not we are spewing gunk into the air. It's harmful in a variety of ways and wasteful as well. We can do better. And, as a farmer, I'm sensitive to soil carbon losses from cultivation and mismanagement. So, I also support efforts to capture carbon from the air and sequester it in soil. The benefits are multiple. That's what the glomalin and biochar posts focus on, but some efforts to scrub carbon using chemical-mechanical systems have also been mentioned.
I also argue against political madness. It isn't supportive of either camp, it's maintaining focus on the issues. This allows policy proposals to be evaluated on their merits, stripped of any instrumental value they have for advancing some political agenda or another.
In truth, I do it all with perhaps more verve than is strictly required. I'm not running for anything, or selling anything, and nobody wants me at their table anyway, so I can call a spade a fucking shovel if it please me. Neither of the regular readers of this blog has yet complained about that . . . well, one of them felt hurt once when it was his spade I insulted, but even he didn't complain in principle. It occurs to me that this may have something to do with the fact that there are only two readers - not counting all the bots intent on selling stiffy pills and such. My bad, it seems.
Posted by: back40 at December 9, 2007 07:57 PMGary, I wasn't labelling the concept of GW as climate hysteria, rather the concept of sudden irreversable change and "tipping points". The science it seems to me is currently so uncertain that none of this can be readily debated in a scientific way. The debate as it occurs is dominated by polemic and politics.
I have always appreciated your take on these issues, sometimes as a lone sane voice it seems, I just thought the post implied that those who seek to clarify the science are getting pigeonholed (although you don't label them this way) as "deniers". I find the denial of the uncertainty and the often explicit deceit involved in the political movements behind the hysterical promotion of climate catastrophism repugnant. I'm of the view that the best decisions can be made when considering the honest appraisal of the evidence as we actually know it.
Most (but maybe not all) skeptics in this realm acknowledge that CO2 can and almost certainly does affect temperature, the strength of the signal is the dispute. I don't think I would be far from your general take on these issues and I trust you will continue to write on them.
I do hope that there are other readers besides myself and one other !
Posted by: Ed Snack at December 10, 2007 12:43 PMHi Ed,
Gerard H. Roe and Marcia B. Baker, "Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable?", Science 318 (2007): 629--632 [no free copy]
We show that the breadth of the distribution and, in particular, the probability of large temperature increases are relatively insensitive to decreases in uncertainties associated with the underlying climate processes.
In short: the fact that we will probably never be able to precisely predict the response of the climate system to large forcings is so far from being a reason for complacency it's not even funny.
I find this logic to be compelling. We should continue to study, developing better climate-prediction tools as Manzi puts it, but "the probability of large temperature increases are relatively insensitive to decreases in uncertainties associated with the underlying climate processes". They are small probabilities it seems, but not zero.
Manzi - and many, many others - see this as a risk management problem.
I argued that this doesn't help much since the probabilities of effective risk management are so low. It's not very comforting, but the best we can do is to tell the truth and not hinder society in its response to those truths. The idea that politicians, or even a gaggle of scientists, can come up with a better plan is laughable. It isn't possible in theory and past efforts have confirmed this.
One bit that Manzi got right, I think, is the idea that we have to juggle lots of risks at once. It doesn't help to put huge effort into hedging one risk while paying insufficient attention to others. You're dead either way.
This is a perfect problem set for distributed decision making. In other words, the more you think about our problems the more you can see that the best we can do is to tell the truth to the social mind and let it decide what needs attention, and how to deal with the issues. The efforts of activists and politicians - all those who are trying the game the system and elevate themselves and their concerns above others - are part of the problem set rather than the solution set.
Posted by: back40 at December 10, 2007 02:34 PM